ENDPAPER
Turning the wheel
BY PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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An End to Suffering touches a reader deeply, personally.
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OVER the years since Pankaj Mishra's An End to Suffering was first published, I have found that readers, both amateur and professional that I know, curiously don't dwell on the book the way they do on Butter Chicken in Ludhiana or The Romantics.
In conversation they bring up Butter Chicken, Romantics, the many books he's edited and even his magazine essays but skip An End to Suffering and jump to Temptations of the West. Not because they don't know it, but because they haven't embraced it in the way they have his others books. I feel it should be the other way around: it is this book that we should be reflecting on — and I mean, really reflecting.
Having re-read it many times now with great pleasure and absorption, I feel certain that it is the best literary non-fiction Indian book in a decade and one of the most beautiful books ever published in Buddhist literature. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World is Pankaj Mishra's masterpiece. And I'd wager it is the work closest to his heart. This is that rare book that touches a reader deeply, personally. There must be readers all over the world for whom this book has become a personal favourite; a book they completely inhabit.
Shimmering prose
I embraced it for its beautiful, shimmering prose, those solitary, book-haunted spells in Mashobra (exact, honest autobiographical details that serve the narrative perfectly), its gripping, contemporary and moving narrative of the Buddha's life, the complex and lucid way it criss-crosses and unravels history, philosophy, scholarship and the alluring, intimate breath of its travel narrative through ancient and present-day Buddhist India.
I'm revisiting the book not to review it (it has been widely and well reviewed) but to look at two aspects of the book I was particularly drawn to and found remarkable: The autobiographical details in the book: the romance of Mishra the reader aspiring to be a writer, and Mishra the seeker.
Three-fourths into the book, he allows these details to intersect. One day Mishra suddenly catches himself feeling empty though he has fulfilled his early ambitions to be a well-travelled, successful and famous writer. By the end of the book, and many years later, he has found some answers to what this sense of dukkha in his life (and in the life of all sentient beings) means in Buddhism. And he begins writing An End to Suffering, a long-held book project on the Buddha he has been hoping to write but has been putting off because he had not, until then, found it urgent and personal enough to begin. I find this admission — full of a rare candour and an even rarer humility — moving. Under the fine erudition, epic scope and many-layered design of the book, this remarkable detail seems to have been lost on most reviewers. But not, I am certain, on the sensitive reader.
The journey for Mishra, however, began 10 years earlier when he left college and moved in 1992 "to a small Himalayan village called Mashobra". Reading the Mashobra section of the book, I often found myself under the spell of the time he spent there, a picture of stillness and contemplation that you can reach out and touch. I discovered with a thrill that I could identify with him when he wrote: "For years, I had felt a small thrill at the sight of the sentence, `I read all morning.' The simple words spoke of the purest and most rewarding kind of leisure. It was what I did now: I read all morning..." Elsewhere he writes, "... I would finally be able to begin fulfilling an old and increasingly desperate ambition. I had wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember. I could not see myself being anything else." Once he settles into Mr. Sharma's cottage, he begins travelling "to the inner Himalayas, the Buddhist-dominated regions of Kinnaur and Spiti."
Idea of the book
Throughout, Mishra's prose is, sentence by sentence, hard-won and beautiful. He went on these long journeys, he writes, "attracted by nothing more than a vague promise of some great happiness awaiting me at the other end". "The bluish air trembled with temple bells". "Moths knocked softly against the oil-stained glass of the lantern."
It is in Mashobra that the idea to write a book on the Buddha first emerges. "It seems odd now: that someone like myself, who knew so little of the world, and who longed, in one secret but tumultuous corner of his heart, for love, fame, travel, adventures in far-off lands, should also have been thinking of a figure who stood in such contrast to these desires: a man born two and a half millennia ago, who taught that everything in the world was impermanent and that happiness lay in seeing that the self, from which all longings emanated, was incoherent and a source of suffering and delusion."
It is only several years and a couple of books later that this search turns from intellectual to spiritual. "I can't recall," he notes, "a spiritual crisis leading me to the Buddha. But then I didn't know myself well; the crisis may have occurred without my being aware of it. In my early twenties, I lived anxiously from one day to the next, hoping for a salvation I could not yet define." But a decade later one afternoon in London he feels a sense of crisis. "But on that afternoon in London, a few weeks after my return from Pakistan, when I thought again of the Buddha, I had become aware too of the futilities of my own life...and I couldn't always suppress the quiet panic at the thought that the intellectual and spiritual vagrancy I had come to know was all I had to look forward to, no matter how much I knew or travelled."
Contemporary Buddha
It is in the last few pages of this 400-page book that Mishra reveals that he could now see the Buddha as "a true contemporary"; "an acute psychologist" who had seen that the mind, where suffering arises from, is also the only place where suffering ends. "I now saw him in my own world, amid its great violence and confusion, holding out the possibility of knowledge and redemption — the awareness, suddenly liberating, with which I finally began to write about the Buddha."
Make no mistake: though the author says that in his "grasping selves" and his "nexuses of desires" he could not find "as much as a trace of humility, or compassion", the act of writing An End to Suffering is an act of loving kindness, humility and courage. It is Mishra the writer turning the wheel of the Buddha-dharma in the way only he knows. I was persuaded by its literary beauty as well as the author's own (self-effacingly stated) dukkha and enlightenment.
I can't think of too many Buddhist writings that are as beautiful and transforming as An End to Suffering. Perhaps Karen Armstrong's Buddha, Sherab Chodzin Kohn's The Awakened One, Peter Matthiessen's Zen journals, Nine-Headed Dragon River, Stephen Batchelor's Verses from the Centre, Jeffrey Paine's Re-Enchantment and Pico Iyer's Sun After Dark. Mishra's book is the rarest of things in contemporary literature: a masterpiece of literary spiritual writing.
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